


The Adventures of Sourwolf and the Sheriff

by ecarian



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-14
Updated: 2012-10-14
Packaged: 2017-11-16 06:36:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/536558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecarian/pseuds/ecarian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek gets kidnapped. He wakes up in the cave with the wrong Stilinski.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Adventures of Sourwolf and the Sheriff

The last thing Derek remembers is ringing up a French loaf and a two-for-one pack of salmon from Jimmy’s Grocers down on Whyte. Erica’s been on a health kick lately. He’s been trying out some new things—turkey, bison, squash.  It’s easier to be around them when they’re in a good mood, and food seems to do that. He’d been putting the bags in the car and then nothing.

“You coming ‘round, son?” He opens his eyes. He’s staring at a cave ceiling. His head is pounding. He feels like he’s been run over with a cement truck. There’s a sharp, lingering ache in his neck from an injection. He tries to sit up but only makes it half way before he has to lie back down.

“Easy there.” That’s definitely the Sheriff.

“Where are we?”

Stilinski has a black eye and a cut lip and he’s not in his uniform. Great start. “Thought you might be able to tell me.”

“No. What happened?”

“Saw a couple thugs stuffing you in the trunk of a car. When I went to investigate, they nabbed me too. Got me from behind. Chloroform, I’d guess.” They’d need something stronger than that for Derek, but they’d be prepared for anything. Stilinski laughs, short and hard and mean; it’s not a happy sound. “Woke up here. You alright?”

The kinds of hunters that kidnap local law enforcement are either idiots with nothing to lose or ones that don’t expect to get caught. Either way, they’re both going to die if Derek doesn’t get them out of here. Stupid, though. Stilinski is pretty high profile. If Stiles hasn’t raised a legion by now, Derek’s a cat.

“I’m fine,” he says, after it becomes apparent that Stilinski’s waiting on an answer.

“You look like shit,” he says, blunt, frowning. Derek tries to sit up again but the walls resolve into riptide clusters. All the blood rushes from his head and leaves him sickeningly dizzy. Poison? Shit.

“They did something to my neck.”

“Let’s see then.” Derek represses his first three instincts at that, and lets Stilinski manhandle him around to check it out. “That looks bad. Can you stand?”

“Don’t have much of a choice,” Derek says, and lets Stilinski tug him vertical. It’s a mistake; he’s probably going to barf. Once Derek’s upright, Stilinski picks up a skirted miner’s lantern—the handle squeals, there’s an overwhelming stink of propane—and carts Derek along until he has enough momentum to trip over nothing on his own.

Ten minutes of awkward silence into it, Stilinski tries for conversation, “I think this is the old abandoned quartz mine.”

“Yeah.” Derek came up here one looking for a good den, once, before he found the train station. It’s not dangerous, just stripped, but it’s too far from town, from his territory. It smells the same, but more arid; dusty and dank and a little like there’s not enough air. He wonders how far down they are. He can faintly smell human-not-Stilinski, enough that when they get to a fork in the tunnel he picks left without thinking.

“You been here before?” Stilinski asks, sounding wary. Derek wonders what he’s thinking, if he’s going to blame this on Derek too.

“No.”

“You just know your way around?”

“There’s an incline.” He’s not lying. He can barely see now, everything is blurry and dancing, and the fluttery feeling of nausea is getting worse. He takes a couple deep breaths. He’s sweating too much. His shirt is sticking to his spine and his heart is racing. Stupid, calm down, it’ll just spread it faster.

“Let’s take a break,” says Stilinski, once the ground has morphed into a hideous, forty-five degree mountain range.

“I don’t need it,” says Derek.

“I do,” says Stilinski, lying, “Do an old man a favour.”

“You’re forty-one,” says Derek, but he stops anyway, and then sits down. Stiles wouldn’t shut up about it, what kind of present to get, what kind of cake. He likes Co-op frosting but that’s too much sugar, so maybe he should just make a pie. What do you think, cherry or rhubarb, his grandma used to make rhubarb pie so he has a recipe, but cherry sounds better. Stilinski’s the same age his parents had been—before. They’d had a double fortieth. Laura made the cake and Derek made the icing, homemade, all chocolate, and all his cousins had helped cactus it with eighty waxy candles.

“My son thinks I’m ancient,” says Stilinski.

“Teenagers are stupid,” says Derek, because that much is patently obvious.

“Did you know those men?” he asks, flipping topics, and that’s the Sheriff talking, interrogating.

“No,” says Derek.

“Any reason they’d be after you?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“People think I killed my sister,” says Derek. He still gets hate mail over it, when he gets recognized by nosy neighbourhood-watch types who don’t think he got what was coming to him, tucked under the windshield wipers or taped to the windows or slashed into the tires or keyed into the paint—the last happened only the once, and he caught the guy who did it while he was carving in the  _E_  of  _KILLER_.  “They get snippy about it.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” says Stilinski. He’s not lying. “Didn’t help you buried her in your yard.”

“It’s what she would have wanted.”

“Would have saved you a bit of trouble if you let the police handle it first,” Stilinski says, wry, and then holds up his hands, placating, before Derek can get up in his face about it. “I know you don’t have any reason to trust us, and we haven’t done much to earn it. I’m just sorry it happened the way it did.”

“Hmm.”

He’s not used to silence from a Stilinski. It feels like a trap, so when the whole situation becomes too intolerable, he heaves himself back on his feet and hobbles up the slope to a flat area. He has enough time to scope out the tunnel they need—the left, which is the one not boarded up—before a huge concussive boom lays Derek out flat. Stilinski is fretful and hovering and his mouth is moving soundlessly when Derek looks up next, minutes later and head ringing, surrounded by pirouettes of absently falling dust spires. He knuckles blood out of his ears and can’t hear more than a cottoned muffle. Of the laundry list of shitty days he’s had, this is a solid Reanimated Relative.

“They blew up the exit,” Stilinski says, like he can't believe it, after the eternity it takes Derek to get his hearing back, his balance. “What the hell is with these guys, Christ.”

When he squats down to help Derek up, Derek has to close his eyes and grit his teeth against an alarming swell of animal rage. He doesn’t know if it’s the poison or the blast, but he’s shockingly out of control. Stilinski hasn’t run screaming, so it probably hasn’t shown up on his face. “Up you get.”

He’s lead to the other tunnel. The boards have been pulled down and a sign fished out of the wreckage. It reads,  _Springs_  with an arrow. “My son’s class had a tour here one year,” Stilinski explains. “There’s a natural tunnel that opens out in the mountains. Hopefully they haven’t thought of that.”

“You should go,” Derek says.

“What?”

“Leave me here.”

“What, no.” He and Stiles have the same pinched look of affront. “What.”

“It’s safer for you,” Derek says.

“They already know I’m connected to this,” Stilinski says.

“They’ll leave you alone if you leave me here,” Derek says.

“So you do know them,” Stilinski says brightly. 

“God, fine,” Derek shrugs off Stilinski’s helping hands and staggers over to the tunnel. Halfway there he loses control of his claws and has to dig them into his own palms to keep Stilinski from seeing them. He's bleeding, but the lamp isn't bright enough to show it. What did they do to him?

It takes forty-five minutes to get to where they’re going, mostly due to Derek’s stumbling. They lose the lamp halfway through, but Stilinski has a lighter. Stilinski’s not expecting him to talk around the mouthful of fangs he can’t see, but if Derek’s eyes start glowing there’s going to be a problem. He doesn’t feel like he’s dying anymore. He feels hot and dizzy instead, like the fevers he got when he was eleven, twisted up and sweating and convinced that he was going to evaporate.

It’s almost unbearable by the time they get to this sprawling, underground glacier pond, the yawning cave entrance at the end limed with three o'clock sun. It's only been four hours.

"I was supposed to meet my son for lunch," Stilinski says, contemplatively. "He'll know something's wrong."

Derek doesn't have anything to say to that. He stumbles over to the pool. His mouth feels tacky. It hurts to swallow the water, but the frigid temperature beats back the red haze of instinct, so he dunks his whole head in and stays there until he physically can’t take it. Stilinski’s crouched next to him when he pulls back with a gasp.

“Better?”

“Yeah,” Derek says, and lies down on his stomach, forehead on his crossed forearms, breathing into the dark fenced in space they create. Water seeps up his sleeves. All he can smell is mud and his own sweat. Good.

“I have to do this with my son when he gets the flu,” Stilinski says, quiet like a secret.

“Bet he hates that,” Derek says; Stiles has always struck him as greedy for heat, wrapping himself up in layers and noise like he has to stockpile and ration. When they sit on a couch, he shoves his feet under Derek’s thigh and his words in Derek’s face and somewhere along the way it stopped being annoying.

“No doubt,” Stilinski laughs, then he goes quiet. “Haven’t talked to him much lately. Seems like all we do is fight now, you know? Ah, sorry.”

“I used to fight with my sister.” He doesn't really know why he says it other than the look on Stiles' face whenever someone brings up the Sheriff, the kind of insidious guilt that comes with lying to loved ones.

“I remember her,” says Stilinski. "At the station. Good kid, good head on her shoulders."

“She thought you were cute,” he says. He checks, and he's right, they blush the same way, the tips of their ears. “Old Man cute.”

“Hey now,” Stilinski says.

“She thought you’d be the one to figure it out.”

"The fire?" Derek makes a noncommittal noise. Stilinski is quiet for a while. He's not as obvious as Stiles, but he fidgets the same way when he's about to ask something he maybe doesn't want to know the answer for. “Did you kill Kate Argent?”

Derek lays his head back down. “No.”

“But you knew it was her.”

“She was a lifeguard,” Derek says, and then wants to take it back. He doesn’t know what it is about this family, but they always seem to make him say the thing he wants to least. Stilinski is the last person who needs to know, but then all the ones that deserve it can’t hear him anymore. “Thought I was cute.”

After Derek became Alpha, Stiles gave him the police report, wrapped in Hulk green paper with bright purple radiation wheels, addressed to Grump the Wolf from Stiles the Human, plastered over with a hundred rainbow stickers. There were blurry photos of the pages just sharp enough to read: age, aliases, timelines, details he knew stripped and sterilized. There’d been a note, S _o I'm not going to say burn this because whoa insensitive, but like, PLEASE EAT OR DESTROY because I don't want to go to jail or get my dad fired_.

“Laura used to babysit for us,” Stilinski says after a long minute of digestion. “Stiles was four. He loved her. I don’t think he remembers. She said she liked how much energy he had. I always kind of thought she was lying.”

“She wasn’t.” Derek at ten had been savage. They thought he’d be alpha for a while, too violent for anything else. Laura had been a grown-up thirteen. He can see it. Laura always wanted kids. “A litter,” she’d said, and laughed and laughed, and their brother had said, “You need to grow like at least eight more nipples,” and Derek helped her push him in the lake.

Stilinski thinks Derek’s dying, or he’s scared, and he’s trying to make it easier. He’s also probably fishing, but he's used to that.

 "Stiles, is good kid,” he says, because he’s broken so many things, and this isn’t something he can fix, but maybe it’ll help. “Good friend. He doesn't think you're proud of him. He worries that you hate him." He doesn't say,  _I wish you would move away and take him with you before I ruin him_ but wants to.

Derek looks up, and Stilinski looks gutted. Then his expression closes off, whole face shutting down. "You know I've never gotten a good answer on how you two know each other."

He's saved from that by a shout, unhappy surprised; the hunters, armed with explosives. Stilinski yanks Derek out of the water, hauls him to a rocky outcropping of limestone stalagmites in time for a bullet to shatter above their heads.

"Fuck me," Stilinski grunts, dropping Derek, who has enough time to roll onto his side, face the wall before the change takes over completely.

He has enough control to bypass Stilinski when he takes off at a sprint. Stilinski shouts behind him, but he ignores it. There are four of them. He leaps on the first, crushes his throat. The other three backpedal, firing guns, a crossbow. He takes a bolt to the thigh, but it's nothing. He roars and it's enormous, wakes up the whole mountain. If his betas didn't know he was missing before, they do now. He chases them out of the cave.

He loses his humanity faster as an alpha, smothered under the weight of his red, red rage, harder to get back. He finds there's nothing left now but prey, threat; the liquid delight of elimination. The second goes down with a broken neck, but he gets a knife between his ribs for it. He's peppered with arrows, one, two, three scalloped along his spine. He rounds on the source and a grenade goes off at his feet, sends him flying, breaks off the arrow shafts when he crashes into the ground, shoves the heads in further. He roars; rage, agony, but it'll take more than that.

Turns out he doesn't need it. By the time he's on his feet there are four answering howls. His prey stop, panic, they're outnumbered, they're going to die.  _Retreat_ , one screams, but four new wolves leap out of the trees, followed by a growling blue monster. The hunters go down, two wolves per human. He crouches, ready to pounce, but then there's a third human, smaller, weaker, falling out of the blue thing,  _Derek_  it shouts, running at him. It has something sharp in its hand, and it skids to a stop, falls back on its ass when he snarls at it. He leaps at that instead.

 _Stiles!_  one of the wolves shouts. Derek lands on it and roars in its face and by the time its expression registers he's wrenching back control, clinging to it with paper tether-hooks.  _No! Pack!_

"Run," he manages.

"This is going to hurt," Stiles says, and jabs something into Derek's neck. The wolf howls back to the forefront, and has enough time to get teeth around Stiles' neck before he recognizes the smell, and then his body gives out on him, relief almost instantaneous as whatever Stiles did works its magic. Probable actual magic. Awareness filters back. The rage is gone, replaced with lethargy.

"Holy shit, that was frightening," Stiles says, around a nervous laugh. He pushes Derek up into a sitting position. Stupid, reckless asshole, do you know what I could have done, he wants to say around his sudden gagging horror. He manages, "What did you do?" instead, words slurred and shoring up against the S-curve of Stiles' collarbone. He's still bleeding. He needs to get the arrowheads out before the skin heals over top, but he can't seem to unwind his arms from around Stiles' back.

"Um," Stiles says, which is interrupted by a smart, "Stiles!" at the arrival of the concerned parent.

"Dad. Dad! Hey, hey let me go, Derek, oh my god I'm not kidding save it for later, my dad is  _right there_ , and you are  _leaking on me,"_  Stiles says, shrill, and shoves at him, and Derek says, mortified when he tries and fails, mouth open and sucking in air against Stiles' neck, "I  _can't_ , what did you  _do to me?_ " to which Stiles laughs, says, "Oh, dude, I didn't do anything, that's all you," and ruffles his hair.

The explanation comes from Erica, stumbling over laughter while Isaac and Boyd extract the arrowheads, the broken knife blade, the crossbow bolt, working around the grip Derek can't get out of around Stiles, while Scott and Stilinski have a conversation over by the knocked out hunters. Stilinski is shouting and afraid and confused, but Scott's had some experience with placating irrational parents. He's a good choice for this conversation.

"So you know how that one time I said you want to gay marry Riding Hoodie here and you said--"

"Shut up, Erica."

"Yeah that, and I said if you better hurry up and put a ring on it and you said--"

"I swear to  _God_."

"That too! Anyway that's what's going on," she finishes, and Stiles, the traitor, laughs and says, "Kind of true, dude."

"It's the antidote or whatever," Derek decides, parsing the needle on the ground, and Isaac cuts in, "It doesn't work that fast," and when Derek opens his mouth to argue, Boyd says, "They got you with an anti-inhibitor. They wanted to leave you out here long enough to lose your mind to your instincts or something and then release you on town," and everyone goes quiet.

"Yeah so," Stiles says, stumbling over that imagined scenario. His voice hums in his throat, his breath puffs in Derek's ear. "You're at the mercy of your sentimental wolfy instincts."

"I am not," Derek says, which sounds as petulant and childish coming out of his mouth as it had in his head, and Stiles says, snotty, "Then let me go," and when Derek can't, he bites, just a little.

"Fucker," Stiles says, too affectionate. Derek’s been responsible for a lot of deaths, but very few by his own hands so he forces himself to say, dragging it out of his gut and horribly aware of the audience. "I was about to—“

"Nah," Stiles interrupts, easy. "You knew. That's why you stopped."

It takes a stupid amount of time to let go of Stiles, and by then Scott's finished with Stilinski. Stiles picks at his bloody shirt, says, "Gross," and then hobbles over to his dad on pins-and-needles legs. They have a quiet shouting match, then Stilinski wraps his son up in a bear hug.

Healed, Derek lets Isaac and Erica help him to his feet, let them touch his sides, his shoulders, ease out of their worry in his new pink skin. Boyd touches his back, once, to assure himself, and then he’s taking lead. They followed him over to Stiles, his dad, Scott.

“So,” Stilinski starts, sounding frustrated, adds, “Is everyone okay?” and waits until he hears assent from each of them before he says, “I have a lot to think about but you’re all going to go home, and I’m going to deal with this.”

“Call Chris Argent,” Derek says.

“What,” Stilinski says, and looks disapprovingly at Scott. “Does he have something to do with this?”

“No!” Scott says, but he looks guilty.

“Probably not,” Stiles agrees. “But he’ll do something about the hunters. He won’t want this getting out.”

Stilinski looks quietly furious. Then he sighs. “First things first,” he mutters.

They stick around until Chris Argent gets there, who sounds angry over the phone at Scott, but shuts up good and quick once Stilinski takes over. Erica and Boyd leave once the Argent arrival is confirmed, but Stiles won’t leave without his dad, who’s overseeing the whole thing, and Scott won’t leave without Stiles. Derek thinks about it, but healing that much always takes it out of him, he’d rather wait for a ride. Isaac stays with Derek.

Stilinski won’t let things lie, the two dead hunters are carted off by Argent, but the other two are arrested, felony vandalism, possession of illegal explosives. It’s not what they deserve, but a record will get them booted out of most hunting circles.

The drive back to Beacon Hills is long and silent. Derek is squished in the back of Stiles’ Jeep with Isaac and Scott. Stilinski drives. Isaac’s dropped off at his guardians, Scott at home, Derek at his apartment.

“You and I are going to have a chat sometime in the near future,” Stilinski says, leaning out the window with a look in his eyes Derek missed out on when he was dating an older woman. "Let's do it again sometime," he says, cheeky before they peal out of the parking lot.

 _Shit,_  Derek thinks, faintly,  _it runs in the goddamn family_.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Also posted [here](http://ecarian.tumblr.com/post/33533937160/adventure-time-with-sourwolf-and-the-sheriff/) on my tumblr!


End file.
